Businesses know that it is essential to keep their networks as secure as possible. Safeguarding customer details, financial information, contracts and other key information is the law as well as crucial for continued business success. Here are our top tips on the best ways to achieve this.

1. If you have a company email service, implement a cloud based spam/AV security product to filter out any spam emails or viruses before they hit your network.

2. If you have file servers on your network make sure you implement image backup and recovery software. This will allow you to quickly recover any corrupted files in a matter of hours instead of days.

3. If you currently rely on manual backups of your files move to a remote backup service. This can be scheduled to run automatically daily at a quiet time (usually overnight). It should be able to create on-site back-ups as well as off- site cloud based back-ups.

4. Always ensure that your antivirus software is kept up to date on all computers, laptops and tablets. Updates contain important security fixes and updates as well as new features which improve the product.

5. Implement proactively monitoring software on your network to find potential problems before they have time to cause a major problem.

6. Ensure your employees understand the importance of creating strong passwords and changing them regularly. If possible prevent staff from storing company information on a USB flash drive or portable device that hasn’t been encrypted.